John McCain seems to just about have the Republican nomination wrapped up, but Mike Huckabee, who by his own admission favors miracles over mathematics, is staying in the race, for reasons only he could really speak to. Perhaps he’s encouraged by Rush Limbaugh’s assertion that he (along with several other members of the conservative punditocracy) just won’t support McCain.
Whenever ol’ Rush manages to claw his way back into the mindspace of the mainstream public, I always start wondering how to look at him. Is his rhetoric prescriptive or descriptive? Does he actually influence the segment of the public that constitutes his audience, or does he just reflect their views? “Dittoheads”, the sometime self-applied appellation of his listeners, suggests that they see themselves as echoing his views, but I think that it’s a little more complex than that.
There’s a certain sort of entertainment that consists mostly of repeating people’s views back to them, giving them a cheap feeling of validation out of hearing themselves echoed by someone with a microphone. Performers in Boston will sometimes make jabs at New York sports teams, which always produces raucous cheers. For a moment, it’s like we’re on the stage, because someone’s up there saying just what we’d say. It’s especially effective if the views being echoed are ones that we feel we’re a bit persecuted for. After a while, it becomes a bit symbiotic, and you can’t really tell who’s echoing whose views anymore.
I’m encouraged in this view of Limbaugh by the way that he talks out of both sides of his mouth about his own role. To his listeners, he’s a political oracle. To his critics, he presents himself as an entertainer, almost as if he’s just playing the part of a rabid conservative, while actually going home at night, drinking merlot, and voting for Dennis Kucinich (in fairness, I consider this scenario unlikely). It reminds me a bit of Jerry Springer. While obviously exploiting some of the worst and most extreme in human nature under the thing guise of helping people resolve their problems, Springer says it’s just a job. I had the intriguing experience of listening to him speak once (at my alma mater), and he said that given the choice, he’d host a show on his main interests, sports and politics, but that his show is what he’s paid to do. Just a job. Only following orders. Nolo contendere?
Be it as it may, there’s something uniquely American about pursuing entertainment and money no matter how destructive it might be, and oddly, I don’t say that in a wholly condemnatory manner. In the immortal words of Red Green, “It’s not smart, or correct, but it’s one of the things that makes us what we are.”
Talk is cheap, but profitable
February 15, 2008
John McCain seems to just about have the Republican nomination wrapped up, but Mike Huckabee, who by his own admission favors miracles over mathematics, is staying in the race, for reasons only he could really speak to. Perhaps he’s encouraged by Rush Limbaugh’s assertion that he (along with several other members of the conservative punditocracy) just won’t support McCain.
Whenever ol’ Rush manages to claw his way back into the mindspace of the mainstream public, I always start wondering how to look at him. Is his rhetoric prescriptive or descriptive? Does he actually influence the segment of the public that constitutes his audience, or does he just reflect their views? “Dittoheads”, the sometime self-applied appellation of his listeners, suggests that they see themselves as echoing his views, but I think that it’s a little more complex than that.
There’s a certain sort of entertainment that consists mostly of repeating people’s views back to them, giving them a cheap feeling of validation out of hearing themselves echoed by someone with a microphone. Performers in Boston will sometimes make jabs at New York sports teams, which always produces raucous cheers. For a moment, it’s like we’re on the stage, because someone’s up there saying just what we’d say. It’s especially effective if the views being echoed are ones that we feel we’re a bit persecuted for. After a while, it becomes a bit symbiotic, and you can’t really tell who’s echoing whose views anymore.
I’m encouraged in this view of Limbaugh by the way that he talks out of both sides of his mouth about his own role. To his listeners, he’s a political oracle. To his critics, he presents himself as an entertainer, almost as if he’s just playing the part of a rabid conservative, while actually going home at night, drinking merlot, and voting for Dennis Kucinich (in fairness, I consider this scenario unlikely). It reminds me a bit of Jerry Springer. While obviously exploiting some of the worst and most extreme in human nature under the thing guise of helping people resolve their problems, Springer says it’s just a job. I had the intriguing experience of listening to him speak once (at my alma mater), and he said that given the choice, he’d host a show on his main interests, sports and politics, but that his show is what he’s paid to do. Just a job. Only following orders. Nolo contendere?
Be it as it may, there’s something uniquely American about pursuing entertainment and money no matter how destructive it might be, and oddly, I don’t say that in a wholly condemnatory manner. In the immortal words of Red Green, “It’s not smart, or correct, but it’s one of the things that makes us what we are.”
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